Solo Pilot: Platform Review: Mixmax

Vol. 6,No. 10

Aastha Madaan

Aastha Madaan is a solo practitioner in Long Beach, California, where she practices business law and estate planning. She is a young lawyer leader and a social media disciple, and she is on the editorial board for GPSolo magazine. She can be reached at aastha@madaalaw.com.

I am a big fan of anything that makes my life easier. Recently, I found a tool that solves several problems within a single platform. Mixmax is a platform that any busy professional will find useful.

A few features of Mixmax that I like are calendaring within e-mail, follow-up reminders, and e-mail templates. I will note that Mixmax is only available for those using Gmail or Google's G Suite for Business.

Once Mixmax is installed as an extension to Google Chrome, it will work with your Gmail account. I have G Suite, so I use my law firm’s domain name but am able to log in through Gmail. When I open a window to compose an e-mail though Gmail, I can click the calendar icon to open up my calendar within the e-mail draft and can then select some times to propose to the other party for our meeting or phone call. The recipient of the e-mail then can choose one of those given times, and Mixmax puts the meeting on your Google calendar. This has to be one of my favorite features of Mixmax. It takes away what could have been a long e-mail thread back and forth trying to figure out a time to meet, and then it takes away the extra step of having to manually enter the meeting in my calendar. This feature is an amazing time saver and is alone worth the annual subscription for Mixmax.

The next feature I really like is the ability to automatically set a pop-up reminder for myself to follow up with an e-mail if the recipient has not responded after a certain number of days. For example, after an initial consultation I send a thank-you e-mail to the potential client and schedule a pop-up notification for myself. At the arranged date, Mixmax puts my last e-mail sent to this recipient on top of my in-box, so if I need to follow up again (to schedule a new meeting with the potential client) or take some other action, I can do it right away. This feature is especially helpful if you do not have a huge staff doing follow-ups on your behalf or do not have a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

The last feature I am covering in this article is also one that has increased my productivity exponentially. I practice in a few areas and have a lot of e-mails that sound the same: follow-up e-mail after consultations, e-mails where I discuss the process of some of the legal services I provide, and more. I previously created these from templates saved in MS Word that I would copy and paste into the e-mail. It would take a bit of time, and I would delay responding to e-mails because it seemed like such a chore. With Mixmax, you can create and save templates to recurring e-mails. When you open a “Compose E-mail” window, there is a place where you can locate and insert the template. I absolutely love this feature and use it regularly. I have been gradually adding more and more templates so I don’t have to retype or copy/paste e-mails that I send all the time.

I highly recommend Mixmax for attorneys who are a little more established and looking to streamline their systems. Pricing tiers are $9 per month for Basic, $24 per month for Professional, and $49 per month for Premium (see mixmax.com/pricing). When I first started out, I probably would not have paid for Mixmax because I was on a tighter budget and had more time on my hands. With the caveat that Mixmax currently works only with Gmail and G Suite for Business, if you have reached the point where your time is more valuable, you are growing, and you are looking for tools that will be simple to learn, easy to use, and will save a lot of time, Mixmax is exactly what you need.